Story from the Wall Street Journal
Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Carol Bartz (formerly of Autodesk) said Wednesday she would be open to striking a search deal with Microsoft Corp. if the software giant offered "boatloads of money.""If there's boatloads of money and the right technology involved, we'd do a deal, sure," Ms. Bartz said at the All Things Digital conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. "It's that simple."
Ms. Bartz also said Yahoo was interested in acquiring social-networking and video start-ups, noting that video advertising has grown sharply in recent years. She added Yahoo, which has cut thousands of jobs in the past year, doesn't plan further layoffs.
The future of Yahoo's search business is a key issue for investors. Ms. Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have talked about forming a partnership on search but the exact nature of any possible deal remains unclear. Mr. Ballmer will speak at the conference on Thursday.
Microsoft was rebuffed when it tried to buy Yahoo last year, but the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has said it remains open to some sort of deal that could bolster its search capabilities.
Yahoo is the No. 2 U.S. search engine, with 20.4% market share in April, according to market research group comScore. Microsoft continued to lag far behind with about 8% of the market, while rival Google Inc. increased its share by half a percentage point in April to 64.2% of the U.S. market, its highest level ever.
Ms. Bartz faces a number of challenges as she tries to revive Yahoo's struggling advertising business. Google dominates the search market and is more effective at making money from text ads. Yahoo is also struggling with a dramatic slowdown in display advertising spending, a key market to which Yahoo is more heavily exposed than Google or Microsoft.
